The Valley of the Fox

Eleven

More than anything autistic children hate any change in the meticulous, often senseless routines they impose on themselves, with which they secure themselves to life, which makes life bearable for them. And I suspected Clare’s docile sleep that night was simply due to exhaustion: a calm before the storm.

I was right. When she woke in the car that morning, in the dark just before dawn, she struggled and screamed, and she screamed the louder when the sun rose and I carried her through the heavy dew up the edge of the long green sheep-pasture and then on down the stream towards the lake. She was like a howling tornado blowing about in my arms and had we not been at least a mile away from the home farm and nearly the same distance from the Manor I’m sure it would have been all over for us; someone would have heard her cries.

As it was she didn’t cease her pain until late that afternoon, out on the island in the little mausoleum, when she fell asleep, exhausted again. Even to remember those early days with Clare is painful; to write about it even more so. And several times then I was just about to pack it all in and give ourselves up.

But I knew that a return to hospital or to some special institution would only be worse for Clare. And I knew as well that, after nearly a year dealing with her problems, I was better fitted than anyone else to help her now. I had rescued her at last and I wouldn’t willingly desert her again.

In the last few weeks she had obviously become attached to one of the nurses in the hospital. And I wasn’t sure whether she even recognised me during those first few days. Of course I know that autistic children, in their bad times, intentionally refuse to recognise people. This is one of the hallmarks of their complaint. Since, generally, they cannot confront their own ‘self’, they will do everything possible to prevent any outsider recognising or promoting that same missing quality.

I knew all this from my past with Clare, when she was suffering: how not to look at or speak to her directly; to approach her in every way surreptitiously, at an angle as it were, never to confront her in any way directly, always to leave room for her mental ‘escape’. And there were other tricks, too, learnt either from Laura or, more painfully, face to face with the child herself. Clare in her earlier days, in Cascais not long after her father had been killed in Nairobi, had only consented to eat from a plate set on the floor, on all fours, like a dog. And so I gave her food in the same way that first day on the island: little chunks of processed cheese Alice had bought, among other food, and which Clare adored, smeared over the digestive biscuits I put out and left for her on the floor beside Lady Horton’s tomb. Clare sat against the tomb for most of that first day, sullen, hunched up, when she wasn’t screaming.

‘There,’ I said, looking away from her. ‘I eat that. That’s good.’

Clare’s speech had improved tremendously in the last year. But now it was non-existent. She had, for some time, come to use the word ‘I’ in relation to herself, and this had been a huge, a vital advance. Since before this, like nearly all such children, she had inverted the personal pronoun in order to avoid any picture of her self. Thus ‘I’ was always ‘you’ in any demand or question. ‘You want some orange.’ … ‘You want to go out,’ she would say.

But for those first few days, more than knowing — yet simply avoiding — any word for herself as an individual, she literally, I think, had no sense of who she was at all. She survived in a continual state of animal shock alternating with panic, no more than that: a state of mere temporary survival, like a rat in a trap, with a mind closed, sullenly or viciously, to all stimuli.

She must have missed her mother. Or did she? At that time it was impossible to tell. Neither her expression nor her behaviour hinted at this emotional loss. There was a numbness in her big blue eyes; they had no depth. And her cheeks were pale, with nothing of their old bloom. She was too far gone from our world to comprehend unhappiness in it.

Sometimes her round, expressionless face would jerk in convulsive movements up and down, her chin stabbing the air, so that her blonde fringe bounced, and I would try to calm her as Laura might have done, stroking her head, offering her sanctuary in my arms; she neither accepted nor refused, simply allowing herself to be moved this way or that like a log. I might eventually cradle her, but the bobbing, craning searching motion, like a fish on dry land appealing for water, would persist, the eyes wide and blank, staring up at me. Those were the worst times, when it seemed there was no future for either of us: Clare a permanent vegetable and myself a fool holding this beautiful, broken doll in my arms.

And yet, to my astonishment, she suddenly started to improve. There was a turning point on the fourth day, a discovery that liberated her. She found the broken stonework at one end of Sir George Horton’s raised tomb and saw the bones inside — the skull and shoulder-blades. And as soon as she discovered these remains she had gazed at them intently, suddenly quiet, fascinated, concentrating on something at last. And after ten minutes of this investigation she began to come alive. It was a remarkable transformation.

She put her hand inside the tomb, tickling the skull at first, before finally taking it out and holding it. I didn’t stop her, for I could see from the expression on her face that here was the beginning of a cure, some miracle seeping from these dead bones in the broken tomb.

Of course, when I thought of it, I realised why these relics might hold such magic for her. The skull here, and the other bleached remains, had given her back some happy memory of those earlier days which she had spent wild in the East African rift valley, when she had followed her father about the scorching rocks, looking for just the same sort of thing: the vital fossil evidence, in just this same shape of part skulls and jaw bones, which she would have seen so laboriously assembled later, realising their importance. And so here, the discovery of Sir George’s bones, in something of the same shape and condition, had given her a sense, only a glimmer perhaps, of old adventure and happiness. A sense of life itself, which she had so lost, had been returned to her.

And then I wondered too, seeing how she so obviously cared for these bones, fondling them almost, whether, in that strange upside down mind of hers, she might have thought they were the remains of her own father, whom she had apparently idolised, mysteriously returned to her here, a gift I had brought her to, and which she thanked me for by consenting to recognise me, as soon afterwards she did.

I didn’t know. It’s only theory, as so much must be with the minds of such children whose thoughts are so totally at odds with the logic and assumptions of our world, living as they do in their own closed universe where, like Clare, they create systems, visions, associations incomprehensible to us, roving through a whole utterly strange landscape of the mind, of which we can only see the smallest evidence, in acts such as Clare’s with these bones, when they surface, as it were, for a few moments into the air of ordinary life.

Certain it is that Clare changed that day, and changed the more the day following when I carried her up, strapped to my back in a kind of rope chair, to the tree-house on top of the oak. From then on, slowly at first but with ever-increasing enthusiasm, she took to life in the trees as if she’d been born in them. Yes, for her it was much more than any child’s game, a treat, something different. For Clare, I soon came to recognise, this kind of existence was the real thing. Again, I thought, a life lived once in Africa had been returned to her. A thorn tree, or a hide beneath a black rock in the Turkana Province, had become the branches of a summer oak and a wild valley hidden in the middle of England.

Clare took to this outdoor existence, the swimming when it came, the rough sleeping in the wind, fishing from the branches, the messy sticky-fingered picnic cooking and eating, as if the whole thing was a way of life specially prepared for her: as if, knowing it to be her only real cure, she had long craved exactly such a life, a life without furniture, beds, walls, roofs, plates, knives, forks: an existence totally devoid of every civilised prop, where there were no denials in closed windows, doors or other people, no timetables or duties other than those necessary for immediate pleasure or survival.

In all, and above all, she found herself in a world now so entirely lacking conventional structures and impositions that it was akin to the secret, unruly landscapes of her own mind. This life in the trees confirmed something vital in her which the people in her life had unwittingly tried to iron out. And this, I think, was precisely the reason for her cure: the valley, for the next two months, awakened in her the only ‘self’ she really had, a completely unconventional soul, a natural animal which prospered here, where it had withered in London and Cascais and had only barely survived with Laura and me in our cottage in the Cotswolds. Here, this quite wild balm at last gave her wings.

It was now mid-June, almost the height of a warm summer. The nights were short, starlit, rainless for the most part. Sometimes it rained quickly in the day, sudden, stormy thunder-showers from plum-bruised skies that were soon gone, leaving the air moist, steamy and filled with insects above the great bunches of cow-parsley that rose up now with a sweet rank smell, feet-high about the valley.

Clare slept at first in a sleeping-bag on the floor of the tree-house, while I slept beside her. But soon, too hot at nights, she was tempted by Spinks’s string hammock, so that I slung this across the upper part of the tree-house for her, and she swayed here in the hot afternoons, head-in-air, mesmerised, the regular pendulum motion visibly releasing her anxieties, drawing the tense sullenness out of her like a poultice.

At night, too, against lightly-mooned skies and a shadow filigree of leaves and branches, I would see the string hammock move from side to side above me, shaped like a canoe wrapped around her body, as she rocked herself far out on some imaginary voyage. And then, the boat floating home on a dark sea of leaves, the swaying would gradually diminish until finally all movement stopped, and the craft berthed as she slept, held by a thread to earth.

Alice came to see us each day, usually in the mornings, out to the island first, and afterwards clambering quickly and silently up to the tree-house, so that she sometimes surprised us, like an animal rising stealthily through the leaves.

I wondered what Clare would make of her. To begin with she made nothing of her at all, she barely looked at her. I had warned Alice that this might happen, told her to take no notice of Clare, to behave just as we did, as if life in these trees, for her as well, was the most natural thing in the world. And thus Alice merged with us, with our life, imperceptibly, doing as we did in the time she stayed with us.

She had brought new clothes for Clare on the first day — cord dungarees, an anorak, socks, plimsolls. But for a long time Clare preferred her grubby hospital pyjamas or just a pair of pants. Later, in the tree-house, she hung up all these new clothes on a line of string, as if they were washing, or the sails of her grandfather’s ketch, and would simply gaze at them, hypnotised, for hours on end, as they swung in the breeze.

Of course, the job I had to do here in the valley was to give Clare life again; life, and speech. So I would talk to her indirectly as often as possible without looking at her, as if talking to myself, while I tidied up the tree-house after breakfast, and she involved herself with one of her elaborate rituals or routines, placing the coloured bricks from the hospital in certain strict and mysterious patterns. Another obsessive therapy she found in stripping the oak leaves about her down to their central stem and then placing these in long opposed ranks on the tree-house planks, like soldiers confronting each other in an opposing army.

The routines were many. But each of them was recreated exactly as they’d been the hour or the day before. There was no change or development here; in these rituals constancy was all. They were her lifelines, imperative duties which licensed not only her very existence but also any attempt she might make to escape from the cage of her anonymity. And escape from this would need speech, I knew — speech as a tendril, words as antennae which would reach out and form a bridge for her to cross into full life. And speech she didn’t have at all beyond mere grunts and screams; this above all I had to return to her.

So I would use words throughout the day and the tree became a babel of my voice. ‘We’re living here for a while,’ I would say quietly as she picked at the oak leaves. ‘Mummy has gone. We’ll live here for a bit and enjoy ourselves. There’s swimming and lots of things we can do. And Alice — Alice that comes up here — she’ll bring us things we need. She has books and food too. Books you might like. That Pigling Bland book she brought: did you see that? Though I expect you’re a bit old for it …’

Thus I would natter on, with apparent aimlessness, about this and that, about anything that came to mind, familiarising Clare with just the sound of words and thoughts again, throwing the currency heedlessly about that she might one day pick some of it up.

Though much more in those early days, besides her rituals, it was the light, the weather and the clouds that most absorbed her attention. She would climb up some way above the tree-house, almost to the top of the oak where I could still see her, and stay there for hours on end, gazing upwards into the blue sky, as if expecting something. It was some time before I realised she was waiting for the clouds which, whenever they passed overhead, she would watch intently, her head moving like a camera with them as they crossed the dome of blue. It was the same with the morning sun. She was often up before dawn, in her perch above the tree-house, waiting in the same way for the first rays of light to streak across the sky, then following the rising flood as it climbed over the rim of trees round the valley, finally cascading over the oak leaves with shafts of green-gold light.

Watching the puffy clouds roll by near to, or studying them in their imperceptible glide far up; lurking, hidden in the grey first light, to ambush the sun, Clare was like a figure for rain or shine in a Swiss weather-house, moving about the tree, alert to every variation in the sky.

Clare’s life then was made up of watching. She watched the birds: the swallows as they swooped and feinted about the sky, on their usually distant aerial careers, but now almost intimate with us, feeding on the wing only a few feet above the topmost branches of our oak tree. She studied the grey and white flash of pigeons as they shot across the valley in sudden cannonades, and then glided upwards in little swoops, breasting the air like a roller-coaster before stalling suddenly, then diving sheer for a second, elated by the very medium of space. There were rooks, too, a colony of them high up on several beech trees above the valley behind us; birds that chattered incessantly at certain times of day, and which Clare would listen to, spellbound, as if eavesdropping on a familiar, long-lost tongue.

On weekends, when they were playing cricket in the park, Clare and I would spend afternoons hidden in the look-out perch on top of the big beech tree that gave out over the estate. And though I listened to the far-away thwack of leather on wood with nostalgia, Clare seemed to hear the sound much more acutely and to see the game in quite a different manner. She looked on the distant players as toys, I think, as though seeing them very close to, and would reach her hand towards them and move it busily in front of her eyes, as if she was picking the batsmen and fielders up on a board in front of her and putting them in different places. She seemed to have an equally long and short vision, like a naive painter who shows details on the horizon as clearly as those in the foreground.

Clare watched and she listened for most of every day then, so that her sight and hearing, always fine, grew startingly acute. There were sounds that she heard, at midday or late in the evening, of some animal moving or crying, which I never heard at all, until, like a pointer, I noticed her sudden attentive stillness as she distinguished a particular warble or crackle in the branches or undergrowth, naming it in her mind perhaps.

‘Pheasant?’ I would say. ‘Rabbit? Stoat? Fox?’ always the man with words, tempting her with them like a bag of sweets. But at best unhappy at this verbal distraction, she would merely turn and look at me, her face blank where it was not annoyed, unable or unwilling to confirm anything for me in her own voice.

Sometimes, as another way of encouraging her with language, I read to her in the hot afternoons sitting in the tree-house, when she was swaying in the hammock above me, the bees and insects a humming gallery all round us. There was the old copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Pigling Bland which Alice had brought down from the Victorian nursery. It wasn’t the most suitable story, this account of porcine deprivation and exile. I don’t know, but perhaps for this very reason it was the only book that Clare took any great interest in. Yet it wasn’t the story, I think, so much as the onomatopoeic dialogue of the animals that caught her attention. Words, if no more than sounds, were acceptable to her: she had banished the coherence of plot from her life.

My voice would rise up to Clare, like an actor’s, trying to give the piglets real life for her. And sometimes she almost laughed; she reponded to the ‘idditty idditties’. But more often there was silence as I ran through the saga of Pigling Bland: only the leaves stirring in some faint breeze as an accompaniment, Clare’s hammock swaying, as she watched them, as she watched the puffy clouds float by, quite given over to some swoon in the summer greenery.

Several times, watching her growing passion for the natural world and the silent skills it fostered in her, I was tempted to give up words myself, give up trying to attach them once more to Clare. Surely, as she seemed to suggest so clearly, we lived in a place and in a manner, in a pre-human kindgom, where language was no longer necessary?

Signs would do — as they did for so much of real importance that passed between Clare and me in that time. For if Clare didn’t speak, she soon willingly followed by example. She learnt to hang the canvas bag out over the lake and dredge for water, and to fish from the same branch first thing or at evening when she heard the perch rise. And later, above all, when I took her right round the edge of the valley, she learnt the limits of our safety, how beyond this hidden domain lay danger, a world where she should not go. She was particularly fascinated by Spinks’s recurve bow, which I showed her how to operate. She wasn’t strong enough to draw it, of course. But she would handle it lovingly, for whole mornings or afternoons, aiming at imaginary targets in the branches, miming the draw and the release, the arrow singing away in her mind and striking home, leaving her with an expression of rapturous satisfaction which surprised me.

All this knowledge she absorbed far more by my showing her than from words. So that sometimes, as I say, I was loth to educate this increasingly skilful innocence, to infect it with words. I thought Clare might well be left free of the long sad language of history. At the same time I knew that one day she would have to learn this. We couldn’t live in the valley for ever. We were not animals in a pre-human kingdom. This vegetable world, this life on high formed a cure for both of us now, but at some point we would have to leave the trees and come down to earth. At some point? Day by day then I was happy to postpone it. There was so much to do, so much to keep us here meanwhile.

I’ve used the phrase ‘vegetable world’. But that may give a false impression, as if we lacked human response in the valley, became vegetables. It was rather the opposite. Freed completely from the ties of conventional thought, from all the devious forecasts and immediate considerations which ordinary life imposes, there was time for real thought at last. One could concentrate on the essence rather than the extraneous; on matters which at normal times occupy only the corners of one’s vision for brief moments: one could concentrate on looking, where one becomes so embedded in the object, so carried away by it, that self-consciousness is lost at last — corruption and mortality forgotten.

Painters work for such vision. But it came naturally to me, in that time out of life, and when it did self-realisation was complete. And instead of the hours in the day having to be filled, as I had expected, these traditional shapes of time disappeared altogether and there were only the acts and thoughts themselves, let loose from the clock, so that one was free at last. There was never too much or too little to do. There was simply the one thing to be done at that moment, without reference to past or future, complete in itself.

It’s only now, weeks later, that I remember certain moments, or actions which at the time I was unaware of while simply living through them, yet which must have impressed me unconsciously, so that I can only regain them now as events in a dream brought to light long after waking.

An oak tree, as I discovered for example, supports an extraordinary variety of minute or invisible life in midsummer: bees, flies, insects of all kinds hovering up and down the long interior glades in the leaves: glades and twisting tunnels and undulating roads made by the branches, a whole stereoscopic geography which, living in the midst of it, becomes as familiar and unnoticed as the tracks or alleyways around a childhood home. Along these airy paths, shut out from the world in a green shade, the insects move, like traffic, with a constant hum …

And what I see — and hear — now, and had forgotten, is Clare gazing deep down into one of these leafy caverns, with an extraordinary longing in her face, as if she was struggling to resist the temptation to glide off after the insects, to actually get into and share their world with them. Instead, compensating for her inability to do this, she hummed with the insects. Yes, she ‘buzzed’ in different ways with her lips, miming a variety of them distinctly, successfully identifying with them in this way. And it’s strange that I’ve forgotten this until now, for it was the first time that Clare used her lips, gave tongue at last, when she properly broke her silence.

I told Alice when she came up to see us later that day, ‘She may talk again. Soon.’ But Alice said nothing in reply. Perhaps, like me, she silently feared a change, any change, in this Arcadia. Of course the world outside was not entirely forgotten. Alice, together with the old transistor, kept me in touch with it. Much of central England was being scoured in a search for us. But no one visited the valley again, and no one, apparently, had traced the car, or Arthur’s clothes, or Alice’s money. In the middle of that warm summer, with so many people looking for us, searching all round us, hurrying to and fro with messages, rumours, tip-offs, we were a still centre in the hidden valley.

‘What about Mrs Pringle?’ I asked Alice one afternoon in the tree house.

‘Nothing. She never mentions Harry Conrad’s visit. She looks at me, that’s all: rather pityingly, I think. As if I should have someone to look after me. The hell with that. I can look after myself. I’m busy anyway, preparing this fête with the local Victorian Society.’

‘Fête?’

‘Remember — I told you. It’s exactly a hundred years ago this

August when they finished building the Manor. So we’re going to celebrate: a jousting tournament, a costume ball. In medieval dress.’

‘I’d forgotten. But surely you’ll need your husband for that?’

‘Certainly not. He’ll be out on Long Island all summer — watching polo, I expect. The divorce comes through in September. I never want to see him again.’

Alice was sitting on the edge of the tree house, her feet dangling in space, looking away from me, down into the green depths beneath. Clare was high above us, on top of the oak, absorbed in her vision of the clouds. It was a humid afternoon, stuffy. Something threatened. And there was another tenseness in the air now between Alice and me. This talk of Arthur and divorce again proposed a future which we both seemed unwilling to face. There were suddenly all sorts of things once more undecided, like the weather, for both of us.

Then Alice looked up at me and, as if to get away from this uncomfortable future, I thought, she said, ‘I’ve been wondering about Clare’s autism. It’s curious …’

‘I know that.’

‘The causes, I mean, There’s a book apparently, The Forbidden Fortress, by someone called Bettelheim.’

‘Yes. I know it. Never got to the end of it, though. It’s mostly case-histories. We gave up on books, Laura and I. On books and quacks and the special schools.’

Alice looked at me now, carefully this time, some big hidden query in her eyes. ‘The causes, though,’ she said again.

‘They vary. Biological, psychological, traumatic, environmental — ad nauseam. They vary in each child, and in most professional theory.’

‘Isn’t it basically rejection though?’ Alice said quickly, as if the words would dissolve in her throat otherwise. ‘By the parents. By the mother. At some early stage?’

I still had no idea what Alice was pursuing at this point. ‘With Clare,’ I said, ‘I always thought it was leaving East Africa. But the medicos and child specialists said not. I don’t think I ever believed them.’

‘Was Laura a cold person?’ Alice asked decisively, as if she’d at last made her mind up on something.

I looked at her, surprised. ‘No. Of course not. Not with me. Least of all with Clare,’ I added equally decisively.

And yet, after I’d said this, I remembered Laura’s initial effect on me, when I’d first seen her in the church in Lisbon and met her afterwards at the sardine barbecue on the windy hill: her apparent hauteur then, the distance she kept from people — like an insensitive Tory divorcee from the shires, I’d even thought. Yes, she could give, she had given a distinctly cold impression then. But I’d seen this frigidity as so obviously the result of Clare’s tragedy and her husband’s subsequent death.

It was these blows that had distanced her and nothing else. There was nothing basic in her character which would ever have made her reject Clare. Besides, I remembered the efforts she had afterwards made on Clare’s behalf, the endless care and attention … I told Alice this and she said simply, ‘People make up for things, don’t they?’

‘Laura never had to make up for anything. That’s nonsense.’

But again, I remembered how Laura had sometimes allowed Clare to do exactly what she wanted: how, in Cascais once, she let her drive a nail through her palm, telling me afterwards that it was the only thing to do sometimes with such children. I didn’t tell Alice, though.

Instead I said ‘But why do you ask about all this?’

‘You have a great tie with Laura still, don’t you?’

‘Of course. We were very happy. I’ve told you. It really worked for both of us, I think.’

‘It didn’t work with her first husband then? With Willy, the famous bone man you told me about. It didn’t work with him?’ she asked rhetorically.

‘No. I don’t mean that. I meant we’d both been very unhappy until we met in Lisbon. But she and Willy had been happy, I think. No, I know: she told me. He was a small, rubicund little fellow. A droll academic. A surprising marriage. But it worked.’

‘You never actually met him of course.’

‘No. And I wasn’t out in East Africa with them either. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tell anything about the man, or about their relationship.’

‘And his death. Wasn’t that rather strange? The hit-and-run accident you told me about, how he was run over by an African in Nairobi.’

‘Strange? Much more awful irony than strange. We never talked a lot about it.’

‘Why?’

‘Just because of the awful irony, I suppose. That’s why. And because of Clare.’ I glanced upwards to where she was still stuck in the treetop, like a weather-vane.

‘But why?’ I asked again. ‘Why all this sudden interest?’

Alice produced a cutting from the Sunday Times, published almost a week before, and handed it to me. It was a long, investigative article — prompted by Laura’s murder and Clare’s recent abduction — about Willy Kindersley, the ‘famous paleontologist and discoverer of the ultimate “missing link” in the ape-man chain’ — the part skull and skeleton of the four-million-year-old ‘Thomas’. But the most interesting thing about it was the unflattering picture it gave of Willy Kindersley himself who, the article went on to say, had been killed in what they described as a ‘mysterious accident’ in Nairobi two years before.

I read it quickly to this point, before commenting: ‘“Mysterious accident” indeed. He was just run down outside the Norfolk hotel by some drunk.’

Then I skimmed on through the article. There were some major paragraphs about me in it: ‘An unlikely figure in this palaeontological jig-saw puzzle … a reputed ex-member of the British Intelligence service’ and suspected killer of Laura. There was another considerable passage about Clare and her autism, citing Bettelheim among others, but finally suggesting its origins in something that might have happened to her in East Africa when she was very young — a ludicrous rumour of witchcraft here, even. It mentioned trouble during one of Kindersley’s latter safaris years before, just before the discovery of the famous ‘Thomas’ skeleton: arguments at a camp way out in the Turkana Province and a raid by local tribesmen during which several of the raiders had been killed, which had afterwards been hushed up. In all, the article, with no hard evidence whatsoever, built up a picture of mysterious, violent machinations in the professional and familial affairs of Willy Kindersley — and of subsequent mysteries in Laura’s death, in my involvement, and apparent ease of escape, and in Clare’s autism and abduction. Finally the writer spoke of an elaborate cover-up over the whole business by everyone involved.

I suppose, given these recent sensational events connected with Willy, this tone wasn’t so surprising. It made a good story, certainly, though little if any of it could have been true, or I should certainly have heard something of it from Laura. The only really hard material that was new to me, based as it was on recent interviews with old colleagues, was a detailed description of Willy’s ‘ruthless professional ambition’ during his many years looking for hominid fossils in East Africa; of how he had ‘trodden on any number of toes — and bodies as well — to achieve his ends’.

I took this to be simply professional jealousy on the part of Willy’s rivals. But I mentioned my surprise to Alice all the same.

‘Laura never spoke of him like that?’

‘No. Just the opposite. She talked of his jokes, his wit, good company. I told you.’

I looked at Alice, annoyed now. ‘You’re trying to tell me I’ve got it all wrong, aren’t you? About Willy and Laura: that I was fooled in some way about them. And about Clare’s autism, too. That it came because Laura rejected her. You’re telling me that the three of them were all part of a lot of dark secrets before I met them; out in Africa — and here as well. A mysterious accident, mysterious deaths everywhere: Laura’s too. You’re telling me that —’

‘No, Peter!’ she interrupted almost fiercely. ‘That’s what the article is telling you if you read it carefully, not me. That’s why I didn’t want to give it you. That’s all in the article! I didn’t invent it. Not me.’

I sighed. ‘It’s nonsense, Alice,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it surely because — because you want a future? All right, but you don’t have to destroy their past, my past with them, to have it. A future with us, if there is one, doesn’t depend on a lot of gossip like this.’ I handed her back the article.

‘Gossip?’

‘Yes. Or at best sheer conjecture,’ I went on. ‘There was nothing mysterious about Laura’s death, for example. I could tell them the truth about that. That would make a real story: it was my old colleagues who shot her, aiming for me. I know too much. They want me dead. That’s why I took to the woods here. And that’s why Ross keeps on tracking me. Why else should he bother so much? Because they want me out of the way: badly.’

Alice seemed to understand all this. Life in the valley reverted to its earlier ways after this intrusion and I forgot about the article very soon afterwards. There was so much to do. We had to have a future, not a past filled with either gossip or tragedy.

And it was immediately after this, seeing Clare’s rapid improvement, that I wrote my first letter to Laura’s father, Captain Warren, out in Portugal. I explained all that had happened: how Laura’s death, far from being at my hand, had been meant for me, a final present from my old colleagues in Whitehall; and how Clare was safe and well, with me again now. I told him I’d understand if he didn’t believe me about Laura, if he thought simply that I’d kidnapped Clare for my own selfish ends. But if he did trust my account, I told him, I planned to get Clare back to him in Cascais, when she was ready to travel, and if some means could be arranged for her to leave England with me unofficially.

I asked him, if he agreed to my proposals, to reply by way of a personal advertisement in The Times. Of course, he might send my letter straight to the police or, with them, set up some trap for me in subsequent travel arrangements. It was a risk. But given his long antipathy towards Britain in general, and his particular bitterness towards the secret men in Whitehall who had deprived him of his own house and lands forty years before, I thought he might well agree to any covert scheme I suggested, or even propose one of his own. His 50-foot ketch Clare, for example, struck me as a possible means of escape from England, and I said as much in a P.S. to the letter. I showed Alice what I’d written. She thought it a fair plan and posted if off some days later when she went up to London.

Meanwhile we extended the tree-house, bringing up more wooden beams from the old pumping-shed and making a lower floor to the house, connected by a ladder to what was now an open terrace on top of our accommodation. We made walls for this small lower room, with strips of polythene first covered by a cross-weave of small, leafy beech branches, so that in the end the breeze was kept out and the structure still maintained a perfect camouflage.

With the same broad wooden planks from the shed, and with the tools and other equipment we now had, I extended our reach over the line of trees that bordered the lake by building a series of aerial walkways with rope handrails through the upper branches, so that in the end it was possible to move right down to the beech tree above the stream at the foot of the lake without coming to ground, always hidden in the leaves. This gave us both another access to our tree house and another escape from it, if need be. We were no longer committed to a single front door.

And besides, we now had an aerial parkland to discover and explore along these wooden tracks. No longer confined to our own too familiar house and backyard, a whole new estate was opened up for us, new trees and leafy vistas, unfamiliar branches where the coppery summer light fell in different shades and patterns. Now we could move through the trees from one green country to another, almost as if the foliage was our permanent element, like fish in a stream moving invisibly through the weeds and shadows.

With more rope I built Clare a swing from one of the lower branches beneath the tree-house, out over the lake, so that if she fell it would only be a dozen feet into the water. But she never looked like falling. Always adept physically, in every kind of acrobatics, this mild trapeze-work came to her quite naturally. And certainly she preferred it, by way of occupation, to speech, speech which was so much more dangerous for her, full of compromises, a blueprint of discipline, of a restrictive order which Clare must have believed she had now well lost. So she grabbed the swing from a higher branch where she kept it out of sight, and would throw herself out over the lake on it, skimming the water like a swallow in the evening.

With the tools from the Manor we built a rough table as well, and Alice brought us down two small Victorian chairs from the nursery, which we could eat from, both of us crouched over the wood like oversized dolls in a nook. We had a small pinewood cupboard as well to keep things in. Thus the little lower room which emerged in the tree-house, where we now slept and ate, became a cosy place. Cosy, but small. It was difficult for me to do more than stretch my legs in it, sitting on the minute chair, after supper, sipping a whisky from one of the red picnic tumblers, while Clare became involved in one of her meticulous, mysterious games on the tiny table next to me.

I watched her one evening here as a bright sunset faded slowly all about us, her golden hair reflecting a last radiance in the twilight like a halo, as she concentrated on her ritual with the hospital bricks, moving them round and about, up and down, in Stonehenge circles and pyramids.

She wasn’t my daughter, I thought. But I loved her as much as if she had been. Loved her in a different way, I suppose, as someone free of me, as one might love an older woman from afar, for a beauty and an independence of spirit, who yet, without her knowing it, relied on me for her very existence. There was an unusual and comforting, a completely unpossessive intimacy between Clare and me; that of complete strangers forced together, who yet miraculously find, without words, that they share the same temperament, assumptions, hopes.

And at such times in the evening, after all the energetic activities of the day, her speechlessness no longer seemed out of place. We might have been two friends, tired together, sitting in the hotel lounge after a long day out in the ordinary world. Friends: that was it. That was what was unusual. There was an adult relationship between us, which her lack of words accentuated. We seemed, as adults, as two old friends might, to understand each other without speaking.

Two friends camping in a cosy place … We even made a shelf for books and had a basin for washing things in. The rubbish we wrapped up carefully every few days and Alice took it away with her in a bag with her swimming things back to the house. For this swimming, of course, which she had done in any case most days down by the lake, now became her excuse for visiting us.

We swam ourselves, Clare and I, as I’d done myself to begin with, first or last thing in the day, in the natural pool hidden behind the fallen tree at the bottom of the lake. And it was here one day, just after first light, down from our tree and sliding through the undergrowth, that we suddenly came on one of the deer from the parkland, a big antlered buck, head high, alert, drawing breath, its nostrils steaming in the early morning air. It was right by the edge of the water, next the ruined pier of the old boat-house.

I think Clare saw it first. Certainly she thrust her arm up at me, holding me back in excitement. But the animal must have smelt or heard us, for it suddenly turned and looked straight at us.

And it was then that Clare first spoke.

‘Game!’ she said, quite clearly, her face alight. And then she lifted both arms suddenly and mimed the action of shooting the buck with a bow and arrow. She drew and released an imaginary arrow several times at the animal, before it trotted away down the edge of the water. But then, like an arrow herself, suddenly released and homing viciously, Clare ran after it, fleetfoot, with an extraordinary speed and vigour the like of which I’d never thought to see in a child, so that I was barely able to keep up with her.

The buck, which before had simply been trotting away from us, now took to its heels in alarm, disappearing into the undergrowth before I heard it crashing up the slope of the valley. But Clare ran with it, keeping pace with it, her gold mop of hair flattened in the wind all round her head, before she disappeared as well.

I found her on top of the valley, leaning on the fence beyond which she knew she mustn’t go, looking out over the parkland where there were only a few sleeping cows. The buck had quite disappeared. She had a pained, mystified look on her face, as if, I thought, having so obviously killed the buck with her initial flights of fancy, she could not now understand where the carcase was.

Then she turned and said to me very urgently, ‘You kill it. You kill it!’

She inverted the pronoun, of course, as she had before in her damaged speech: she meant ‘I’ when she said ‘you’. But now, so much more than a single word, she could put words together into an expressive sentence. She could speak. I was so pleased with this miracle that it was only afterwards that I reflected on the nature of what she had actually said that morning in the dew-drenched summer airs above the valley. ‘I kill the deer. I kill it!’ That was what she’d said. A strange, animal vehemence which had not been there before had suddenly entered Clare’s life.

Or was it so strange? Wasn’t this hunting fever, more simply, a quite natural extension to her present lifestyle? A form of life in which, identifying with it so completely, she came unconsciously to mime its original foundations, in killing and pain and the survival of the fittest?

Certainly as a result of nearly two months in the woods and this developing urge to track and kill, all Clare’s instincts and senses had become startlingly acute — to the point where I was disturbed by her animalism, seeing in it another and perhaps irrevocable move away from the real world I hoped she would one day occupy again.

And yet it was exactly this animalism, this heightened instinct for survival, which probably saved our lives a week later. I would never have noticed the ominous signs myself.

A footprint, a broken twig, a dead leaf where it shouldn’t be? A shadow moving when it shouldn’t move? Some slight noise at twilight that wasn’t a bird or an animal? What was it that first caught Clare’s attention? I don’t know. What I do know is that one evening, returning from a late swim, Clare stopped suddenly on our path through the undergrowth and quickly drew me aside into the heart of a bush. ‘Here,’ she whispered in my ear, for she could put whole coherent sentences together now. ‘Someone too is here.’ She pointed immediately ahead.

‘Alice?’ I whispered back to her, looking about me in the shadows. But it couldn’t be Alice, I thought. She had only left us a few hours before and she never came down late in the evening in any case.

Clare shook her head. ‘No. It has been here a days,’ she said in her disordered English.

‘But what? What is it? A he or a she?’

‘It,’ she said simply.

I looked around me in the gathering dusk, straining my ears and eyes. But there was no sound, nothing unusual. A bird suddenly twittered in the undergrowth ahead of us — a long trill of mild alarm, a blackbird running over last year’s dead leaves. There was a deep silence again. And then I heard another tread in the woods, not a dozen yards away, on the path we’d been on, coming towards us. It was no louder than the blackbird’s run, but it had quite a different pace, slow, infinitely careful: the paws of some animal, a fox perhaps, nosing through the twilight? But it wasn’t a fox, or a badger or mole, I thought then. The steps were more pronounced, and there were two of them, not four. They were surely human.

Then, in silhouette for a moment, I saw a figure pass between two trees against the flare of dying light on the lake: crouching, thin-shouldered, the skin there with an inky shine in the sunset. It was gone in an instant, flitting soundlessly away into the shadows. I thought it might be Ross again. But Ross wouldn’t crouch like that, I thought, or pass so silently.

Above all, Ross would hardly be moving as the dark shadow had, naked into the night.